Category: Uncategorized

A brief period of winter rain has passed, leaving a lovely warm late winter day that belies the dangers of another coming drought period. It should be raining more.

Among other developments in life, I’ve been reading some climate change-related Sci-Fi (Kim Stanley Robinson’s Green Earth), and it’s causing some odd feelings. When fiction predicts fact, and those facts are awfully “inconvenient”, actually frightening, it drives me more and more towards an uncertainty about what should be — what can be — done. Should I be spending my time reading fiction?

That said, what we might do is ‘keep on keeping on’. In my case, this means to keep organizing, keep gardening, keep researching, keep writing, and keep myself open to absorbing the joy and good nature of my son (hopefully other beings exude these qualities around me too, and I can notice that too!).

For now, as I embark upon the start of a PhD-getting process, I place here my recently finished conference paper, on “The agrarian origins of authoritarian rural populism in the United States: What can we learn from 20th century struggles in California and the Midwest?”. The paper is an initial exploration of the intended topic for my dissertation research. Feedback welcome!

Democratic Choice in an Economistic World (Part 1 — this will be posted in three parts)

A street musician I know named Omer once had an album with a curious title: “Democracy is a Good Idea”. For someone who spends most of his time in public cursing others and singing out of tune, Omer makes a bold statement. Most of us, I’d like to think, share his optimism. But what are we up against, when we lean on democracy for making social choices? In today’s democracy, we are confronted by an underlying value system that makes certain decisions for us, in a certain way. Those decisions, unfortunately, do not abide by the needs or desires of the populations that make up the “demos” (“citizens”) in democracy. I’ll use two cases/scales (gentrification in the micro, and environmentalism in the macro) to show how, without necessitating conspiracy, direct corruption, or even ill-will, governments and government officials place the values of economics ahead of all else. This tendency to prioritize economic growth and economic value above all else can be called “economism”.

As a warning: I am aware of the criticizable leftist writer tradition, where analyzing the modern order and coming up with damning indictments isn’t necessarily followed with satisfying or equivalent offerings of solutions. I don’t presume to know the exact solution to the problematic tendencies I describe here, but I will recommend strategies for challenging economism from within the current order, even if they seem inadequate. I hold hope—without naiveté—that experimental challenges can provide valuable lessons towards more comprehensive and effective solutions to the problem of economism. Eventually, maybe we’ll prove that democracy was a good idea after all.

Economism comes in many forms; at base it makes money the primary measure by which we assess the value of things, and ensures that only those things that can be priced are considered valuable. Economism as such idealizes money as the ultimate value around which to arrange individual or collective rules, thoughts, and actions. It is found in tendencies of modern political thought, like the idea that “jobs” are an unmitigated good, or that environmental regulations are “bad for the economy”. It can just as well be unconscious, as in the way we individually tend to prioritize making and spending money over other activities regardless of our own interests. One impetus for economism is the condition that money has become a stand-in for the things that we actually need for survival, happiness, and meaning in our lives. Increasing the number of jobs may be good in general for peoples’ ability to eat healthfully, as the connection between mouths and sustenance is mediated by the presence or absence of money, and access to money is mediated by the presence or absence of jobs. If, however, money could be taken out of the equation, we would see that the important aspect is the food, not the money that buys it or the job that provides the money to buy it. Economism embodies the norms of a monetized society, while at the same time it reinforces the monetized values of that society. And this reinforcement takes place most obviously through policy.

Government policy is where a society’s values are supposedly codified; in reality, policy often contradicts the expressed desires of democratic populations in favor of economistic priorities. An example of legislative, legalistic economism can be found in the Californian constitution [italics added]:

1954.25.  The Legislature finds that the price charged for commercial real property is a matter of statewide concern. Price controls on commercial rents discourage expansion of commercial development and entrepreneurial enterprise. These controls also discourage competition in the open market by giving artificial price benefits to one enterprise to the disadvantage of another. Because the impact of these controls goes beyond the local boundaries within which the controls are imposed, the adverse economic consequences become statewide. In order to prevent this statewide economic drain from occurring, the Legislature hereby enacts a uniform system with respect to commercial rents, which shall apply to every local jurisdiction in the state. This legislative action is needed to prevent the imposition of artificial barriers on commercial rents, as well as to define those areas not included within the definition of commercial real property.

This section was written in response to Berkeley, CA passing commercial rent control to protect the character of some of its business corridors. Reading this paragraph, it’s hard to avoid the sense that its drafters considered something called “the open market” to exist aside from society. But the reality is that it doesn’t: the “free” or “open” market is a fiction that has never and could never exist anywhere, as economies always operate in relation to environmental conditions and human cultures and values, factors that are impossible to negate completely and be left with something called only “the economy”—how we organize ourselves to make a living. Throughout time, how we make our livings has always been conditioned by our ways of self-organizing (government and institutions) and the stories we tell about ourselves and the world (values). “The economy” is a thought device deployed to understand how we sustain ourselves, which has greatly varied from culture to culture, and over time. Though the things we need to survive as living beings are more fundamental than the particular social formations that provide us these things, economics as a profession looks at the former (food, shelter, health care, etc) always through the lens of the latter (in our modern case: money). What economists—and the politicians who follow them—tend to ignore is that money is only one aspect of “the economy”.^[1]

It may be popular wisdom that “money doesn’t buy happiness” but that wisdom has yet to translate into mechanisms to prioritize non-money values in the social choices we make, either the individual choices that collectively become social choices (like purchasing trends), or in the overtly social choices we make (through government). The constitutional language referenced above legally prevents communities from using commercial rent control, one potential tool in the struggle against small business displacement caused by gentrification, showing clearly how economism can pervade government and influence social outcomes.

Gentrification’s causes

Those who are opposed to the displacements of people, businesses and culture that stem from gentrification are often unclear on how social choices that promote gentrification are made. One popular narrative about gentrification argues that money-poor artists are the pioneers in the gentrification ecological succession: they move into a run-down neighborhood and make it hip, leading to its “revitalization”. But if we look broader and deeper, we find problems in this narrative. Depending on the context, an artist might be a ‘gentrifier’ one day and gentrified in the next. Is it fair to place the blame for gentrification on those whose primary motivation for living in cheap areas is a desire to spend more time in creative pursuits than on working to pay exorbitant rents? In terms of actual displacement (the clear negative effect of gentrification), artists tend not to contribute directly; it is the later followers of artists who more often raise rents and evict tenants.

Following this logic, some activists blame individuals higher on the wealth scale for their housing purchases in an up-and-coming neighborhood or for their support of boutiques and fancy restaurants that are the canary of the gentrification coal mine. But both aspects of this narrative (roughly, ‘the hipster’ and ‘the yuppie’ as causes of gentrification) miss the crucial difference between consumptive money power and investment money power. This is a crucial difference for understanding where economism stems from and how it might be challenged, because while money certainly has value in its ability to get a purchaser goods and services, its more powerful value lays in its ability to make investors more money through the process of investment.

These investment decisions are driven in part by our current monetary system, which requires each individual agent who acquires debt (and most investment in real estate is based in debt-accumulating loans) to accumulate enough money to pay back that debt with interest. Because an obscure semi-private entities (central banks) are allowed to create money essentially out of thin air (called ‘fiat money’) and then loan this with a condition of interest, there is never enough money in the system to pay off loans: more money must constantly be created (through profits) in order to keep payments flowing to the makers of money. A short video that describes this process well is available here.

‘Hipsters’ may increase neighborhood appeal; ‘yuppies’ may buy into that appeal; and real estate developers may take advantage of that yuppie interest. Yet it is the sources of investment capital (banks, investment firms and stock markets) that mandate borrowers to make a profit, and enables the physical developments that drive gentrification. Gentrification is driven primarily by real estate investment and disinvestment decisions, and while it is important to acknowledge how individuals and groups contribute to or reduce the impacts of gentrification, it is equally important to acknowledge that (in the words of Neil Smith, scholar of gentrification) “even yuppies have very limited choices in the housing market, albeit far more choices than the poor.”

The important point is that assigning causal guilt based on a buying market position is theoretically weak and strategically a dead end. Yes, individuals contribute to gentrification with their purchasing, employment, and sales decisions. But the major culprit is impossible to pin down because it is mobile, shifting, and flows through the individuals commanding its power. Pin down the individual, the power flows elsewhere. This is the power of capital; the capital that drives capitalism. In an economistic society individuals act “rationally” within the capitalist system, so profitmaking (debt repayment) guides choices, and choices that amplify capital are rewarded.

“So, while the question of consumption and the availability of consumers is by no means irrelevant, it is secondary to the far greater power of capital.”

I’ve been off the blogging trend for a while, but am hoping to get back on it soon!

In the meantime, some new writing can be found:

• A blog for Food Tank on the “Mega-mergers” that threaten a reasonable, just, sustainable food future.
• A peer-reviewed academic article in ephemera journal (“organization studies”) on “Looking to Food Sovereignty Movements for Post-Growth Theory“.

Be well!

I had the pleasure of interviewing at the end of 2015 with Devon and Chelsea for their podcast series “Delicious Revolution”. Check out the interview here.

From their site: “Delicious Revolution is a show about food, culture and place. We talk with people whose expertise in food comes from working with food as farmers, fishers, artists, cooks, activists, scholars, journalists, and more. They spend a large portion of their life thinking about food- what it means, how to make it, how to change the food system, how it ties together societies. We will bring you in-depth conversations with some of the brilliant people that inspire the ways we think about food.”

Here is my 2014 MA Thesis! Hot off the electronic presses!

Blame it on human nature. That’s what we tend to do. Exploitation of the weak by the strong? Must be the greed inherent in human nature. Oppression of women by men? Must be the dominant aggression inherent in male nature. But these explanations are more accurately described as justifications. Excuses.

Why? Because the reality of human nature is much too complex to be leveraged as an explanatory mechanism. Instead, human nature should be seen as a sort of “soft wiring” that indicates, but does not entirely delimit, the possible behaviors and attitudes available to humans, as individuals or as societies. The reason why this alternative idea—of humans as multifaceted and NOT subject purely to the whims of biology constrained by evolutionary imperatives—is so important should be obvious: those who seek social, political, ecological changes to the current world situation need a faith in the malleability of human behavior to have a justification for seeking those changes.

In a static, limited concept of biological evolution one finds a static, limited concept of human nature. In the context of these assumptions (that evolution is driven purely by individual organism-based competition; that essential human nature stems from that evolution), capitalism becomes a logical outcome of “every man for himself” Darwinism. Social Darwinism never died, and it lives on in the “selfish gene”s application to the ethos of modern-day capitalism. “Greed is good”, “Job creators”, “growing the economy”, “encouraging industry competition” and other such truisms are all logical outcomes of these assumptions about how the world works.

A foundational assumption regarding our relationship to the environment is the story of the “Tragedy of the Commons”. So common is this idea that we don’t even think of it as debatable, though its progenitor (Garret Hardin, writing in the 1960s) has been called out many times in the scientific community for the evidence-less nature of his original essay on the subject, and for the “scientific” cover his paper has given to privatization, neoliberalism, and Northern hand-wringing for the problems we’ve caused in the global South. The premise of the ToC is that, each person managing what Hardin erroneously calls a “commons” (really, he’s referring to “open access” resource situations)—say, a grazing land that anyone can put their cattle on—will maximize their own benefit from that resource even if, in the process of using it and without intention to screw anyone over, the resource becomes overused or ruined because everyone acts similarly.

It’s not hard to see our current socio-natural systems in late capitalism as victims of this tragedy writ large. But what Hardin and his acolytes have failed to see is how this tragedy isn’t the inevitable outcome of some underlying human nature or physical survival imperative that foregrounds selfish behavior, but is rather the occasional product of very specific social traditions, developed habits, moral understandings, and accepted narratives, as well as levels of ecological awareness among communities, and the ecological imperatives they live within, driven by economic structures of production. All of these factors are contingent and malleable.

Grazing land in much of the world which is or was managed as a true commons has been grazed for hundreds if not thousands of years, in the absence of a profit motive, and with the very real presence of traditional social relationships dictating proper and improper use of the land and proper relationships amongst people who rely on that land. “True” commons are managed with a complex combination of self interest, other-concern, social awareness, and social sanction for violation of trust and solidarity. It’s not such that commons management is or was ever easy or problem-free. No one can unquestionably argue that we once lived in Utopian communities where all needs were met and people spent all day having sex and eating (though that might’ve been true; read the book Sex at Dawn for a taste of that idea), but it is certainly probable that conditions for resource use that weren’t inherently over-extractive and anti-sustainable have existed many times throughout human history, and could occur again if we were to be conscious and thoughtful about our human nature (including its foibles), non-human nature’s nature (its complexity, vulnerability, and resilience), and ways to well intersect the two.

Finally, what does the environment have to do with you? Well, beyond the obvious (we are part of the environment and we need aspects of it to function more or less “well” in order for our physical bodies to survive), the environment defines us as much as we define it. Our human nature wasn’t just forged previously in the crucible of our interactions and transactions with non-human nature; it is forged ongoingly by the same. And where, really, is the line between human and non-human? The author Alva Noë has written convincingly about the dubious proposition that our mind is held or located within the brain. His argument is too complex to delve into here, but imagining that he’s right in positing that our minds are more so a process constructed by the interactions among the brain, the body, and the environment than a computing function interpreting a world that is “out there” while our minds are “in here”, this leaves us in a better position to understand the ecological and social crises we face.

These crises have coevolved; human social systems and the non-human environmental systems they rely on are interpenetrating. The crises we experience currently can be seen as reflections of the intersections we enact and the value systems that define and create stories around those intersections. If we wish to transition to another form of intersection—to an interpenetration that works—we need to start by reframing the story of our own capacities, of our own nature.

“Everything gardens” goes a saying in Permaculture. We humans have been “gardening” for a long time, preceding even the ascendence of agriculture 10,000 years ago as a way of securing sustenance. Hunting and gathering tribes (our main social form for at least 200,000 years) did more than hunt and gather; some mixed broken pottery with charcoal into “Terra Preta” soil that stabilized nutrients in washed-out tropical soils; some selected certain tree species to create edible landscapes at the regional level; some replanted smaller, underdeveloped bulbs while harvesting wild Brodeia roots, increasing the bulbs’ population size; some used fire to change species composition, soil fertility, and habitat types.

At the same time as these interventions, humans were being affected by the contingent circumstances of global climate, of predatory animals, of disease incidence and bacterial evolution. Microbes gardened us while we gardened the first domesticated lettuce. We will continue to experience this mutual use/mutual dependence no matter how technological or developmentalist we become. We only need to embrace and cultivate these dependencies into functional histories of balanced interaction and meaningful co-evolution that serves a thoughtful long-term goal.

It’s true that in our more recent years, humans have done a smash up job of destroying and disturbing vital earth systems. But nature is resilient, and unpredictable. We do not know the exact result of our interventions, of our habits, of the stories we’ve been telling and sowing. The only thing more unpredictable than nature is us, the human element of nature. What will we do? What will we think? How will our thoughts and our actions intersect with the other constitutive pieces of our brain/body/environment/mind? How will the environment garden our behaviors? How will learning and coevolution occur? How will healing happen? And crucially, what is our thoughtful long-term goal?

Theories of Change in Achieving Land for Food

Does this piece make sense? Please let me know if you think it doesn’t. Thanks, Antonio.

I work as an urban farming educator (paid) and as an urban farming advocate and community organizer (unpaid). My experience of the past ten years in the diverse Bay Area of California has brought me into contact with a wide range of individuals and organizations committed to food systems change with varying theories about how to make that change. Diversity of opinion and approach is inherently good, but there are times when ostensible allies dismiss each other’s work, and collective efforts that create alliances are subverted by dogmatic attachment to one particular way of doing things. In this viewpoint, I consider how differing theories of change might be accommodated and how actions towards sustainable food systems (in the context of farmland protection) might be made more strategic and successful by doing so.

I begin with a tale of two extremists: there is a gentleman in my community who runs various urban farming and food distribution projects, all built on his philosophy that everything should be free. He wants a gift economy to grow and replace the money economy, and every project he starts must abide by the principle that people can’t be paid for working, and no one should be charged for anything. He has often expressed skepticism of the policy work of the San Francisco Urban Agriculture Alliance (which I organized in 2010). For instance, we spearheaded and successfully passed legislation that legalized agriculture in our city’s zoning code, and also legalized the sale of produce from backyards and private lots. While many urban agriculturists here welcomed this change, some (like this man) thought it was not radical enough to constitute “real” change.

On the flip side, there are folks in our community who are dedicated to using business to create change. Another acquaintance of mine (who runs a successful local food business) has dedicated many years to developing and supporting youth employment, good farming practices, and education of the public on food and farming issues. She is, however, dismissive of projects and people that profess a kind of anti-capitalist ethos (like the aforementioned man does), and she has rarely participated in our alliance due to her belief that it is dominated by dogmatic radicals.

These examples show how theories of change can border on dogmas, and confront my attempts to organize food systems change in San Francisco: the anti-capitalists insist that change cannot be made via markets, that it must be driven by noncommercial intentions; the entrepreneurial enthusiasts insist that change is most effectively made via the market, and dismiss direct action, civil disobedience, and nonmarket efforts as utopian and unrealistic. For those concerned with the preservation of land for sustainable agriculture, I’d like to advocate a third way. Preserving land for community-serving agriculture over the long term requires some combination of pragmatic thinking in the short term and idealistic thinking in the long term. By looking at the larger “movement ecology” of how differing theories of change support, detract, or relate to each other, food systems practitioners can challenge their own often unconsciously held dogmas and contribute to an expansion of what solutions are possible or practicable.

Most contemporary market-based land preservation efforts seek to improve the profitability of “alternative” (or sustainable) farming and increase its scale in order to spread its environmental and social benefits and compete with large-scale “conventional” (or industrial) farming and other land uses. Nonmarket efforts seek to delegitimize profitmaking in favor of other goals, seeking instead to prioritize values like “community need” in how decisions are made about land use. Unfortunately, these nonmarket values tend to be nebulous and contentious concepts, and are not as easily quantifiable as profits.

Obviously, not all projects to transform food systems fall neatly into a simple “market-based” versus “nonmarket” dichotomy of food system activism. In fact, many contemporary projects are not actually dogmatic in their approaches, yet are still critiqued by food systems development practitioners who maintain dogmatic positions. The third way I advocate, then, is not a prescription for a certain mode of action as much as a lens through which to see how market and nonmarket efforts are both worth supporting, to avoid discounting the importance of varying approaches to action. It is also a lens to critically consider each approach in relation to opposing theories of change, in order to not assume that any approach is good enough or sufficient. Both market and nonmarket approaches are effective in certain ways, but limited in others. Work that combines key aspects of both approaches will prove more successful, I believe, in creating long lasting change than sticking to only one theory of change, or one method of action.

What might this look like on the ground? I use two projects to indicate how we might draw useful lessons from each theory of change and amplify their efficacy. The Food Commons project is an effort to raise funds to invest in regional food system infrastructure, hoping to catalyze investment into growing a “good food” economy that would be financed, owned and operated by regional community institutions. Occupy the Farm was an act of civil disobedience wherein hundreds of urban farmers broke onto and occupied a piece of publicly owned land in Albany, California, in order to prevent it from being sold and developed. Since being evicted from the site, members of Occupy the Farm continue organizing towards establishing an educational urban farm on the site to be managed as a “commons.” Food Commons and Occupy the Farm share the goal of land preservation for the purposes of expanding sustainable agriculture, though at different scales. Both projects use the word “commons,” but their uses of the word differ and so do their tactics towards creating it, roughly following a market (Food Commons) and a nonmarket (Occupy the Farm) approach.

Occupy the Farm’s action led the landowning agency (the University of California) to reconsider its development plans—though it is difficult to determine whether and how exactly the action was a key cause of this change. The 10-acre site is now slated to become a “metropolitan agriculture” education center for the university. Though the occupation achieved this change, the site’s limited size and politically distinct context of being owned by a public body indicate the limits to this type of direct action as a means towards protecting privately owned farmland on a broader scale. That is to say, it would be very challenging if not impossible to replicate or scale up something like Occupy the Farm into a broader force for land preservation. Yet Occupy the Farm, by refusing to accept the economic austerity model pushing public institutions to sell off assets or the political structures by which these decisions are made, created a space where other realities could be imagined and enacted, and there now exists a possibility that the site could contribute to more sustainable food systems.

Food Commons, in contrast, operates more pragmatically, treating existing political and economic structures as givens, tweaking them to create “Food Trusts” (which they define as “nonprofit, quasipublic entities”) that would acquire vital food system assets and lease them to “Food Hubs,” the business base of this new, expanded more equitable and sustainable food system. This project bucks industrial farming norms and repeatedly emphasizes aspirations of increased local ownership and accountability in the food system. If successful, Food Commons would no doubt aid the preservation of land for sustainable agriculture (among other “good food movement” goals). Yet, the project’s logic assumes that the use of the Trust’s assets will be economically competitive, and that its good food system will expand due to this economic competitiveness with other land use options. However, land markets (and therefore land use decisions) are often tied to cycles of real estate speculation and stock market-related booms and busts. According to Lawrence Yee, a progenitor of Food Commons, “we did not address real estate market cycles, because by acquiring land and putting it into a Food Commons Trust in perpetuity, you are essentially removing it from the vagaries of the marketplace and speculation”. This is a certainly an innovative approach, but within a skewed market environment distorted by oligopolistic control of food systems assets and a policy environment distorted by the political power of such oligopolies, Food Hub enterprises may not be able to compete, or acquire such land in the first place (due to inflated land values).

There are things that can materially support sustainable food producers in competition with the industrial system, such as direct payment subsidies of the federal farm bill, EQIP programs that promote on-farm environmental initiatives, and conservation easements. These government policies and programs are more likely to emerge and thrive when backed by a vibrant social and political movement that is dedicated to ecological and community-serving land uses and works on shifting values as well as policies. Business enterprises are clearly a part of this nascent movement, yet the logic of business cannot in and of itself cause these necessary shifts. Shifting the economics of the food system will require broader efforts beyond the mere expansion of business. Similarly, the social movement for good food cannot achieve transformative success in land preservation if it relies entirely on volunteer energy or a dogmatic adherence to anti-capitalism.

If we conceive of market and nonmarket approaches as complementary strategies instead of ideological opposites, we might achieve better and more long-lasting land preservation for sustainable agriculture. Nonmarket (or anti-market) efforts like Occupy the Farm can challenge dominant narratives and transform values by offering an alternative to the privatization of public resources; promoting the non-economic value of urban farmland for farming-related education; developing new forms of democratic representation and process; and encouraging citizens to engage as political actors, not just consumers. Meanwhile, market efforts—from small ethical food businesses to the ambitious Food Commons—help preserve and expand actual assets that are crucial to an eventual mainstreaming of sustainable food production, while creating income opportunities for communities and participants in the food movement. After all, in a capitalist society even nonmarket direct-action activists require incomes!

If all food systems development practitioners considered this sort of movement ecology around land preservation (but also in relation to any important issue), we might end up with less acrimony between food systems development practitioners of different political persuasions and tactical preferences. Nonmarket food systems development practitioners would recognize the practical importance of nonconfrontational, valuable market efforts and be tangibly supportive of such efforts, for instance by encouraging the donation of money towards the preservation of agricultural land for social enterprise farming, providing hands for worthy projects, or helping to build an ethical consumer customer base for them. Conversely, practitioners grounded in market logic would recognize the importance of political organizing and the need to shift society’s overall values and incorporate such work into their projects. For Food Commons and similar efforts, such support might be as simple as setting aside some percentage of profits made via sustainable food ventures for the employment of grassroots political and community organizers, or the production of media representing new narratives to transform the values of society at large.

In our current culture, the primacy of private property rights over the role of agricultural land as the common heritage of humanity allows continued destructive development. This prioritization has not and most likely will not be redirected significantly by ethical businesses or purchasing decisions (at the least, not on the timescale required to preserve precious remaining agricultural lands). Some combination of more stringent regulation of land use, public and trust ownership of valuable agricultural land assets, and commons-based approaches to land ownership and management can provide support for a new normal in land preservation and use. But these in turn require a refined and improved vision for the appropriate role of private property rights in a sustainable society, and a reinvigoration of sickly democratic structures to deliberate on this topic transparently and equitably.

While asking food businesses with already-tenuous profit margins to contribute as well to nonmarket efforts may seem unrealistic, food systems development practitioners must acknowledge that only with action towards long-term value, policy, and governance shifts—not just pragmatic profit concerns for the immediate future—will previously unthinkable wins over time become more achievable. Additionally, the realization of these once-‘utopian’ demands will help those attempting to ‘do well by doing good’ become more successful in securing equitable land tenure, food systems transformation, and sustainable livelihoods for all.